At Sea
Following an early breakfast in the Chilean capital of Santiago – where we had a brief opportunity to soak up the sun before heading south! – we made for the airport for our charter flight south to join the National Geographic Explorer at Ushuaia. This was an international flight from Chile to Argentina, and during our short excursion into the National Park that surrounds Ushuaia – destination: the most southerly Post Office in the Americas – there was evidence of a long-running rivalry between the two countries. I'm sure there must be a most southerly post office in Chile also!
Lunch was on board a catamaran that sailed the Beagle Channel providing magnificent views of Ushuaia, situated midway through the channel that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with the distinctive peak of Mount Olivia as a backdrop. Birders were treated to close observations of Rock Cormorants on the small islands in the channel.
More territorial rivalry awaits us in the Falkland Islands. It is now, some thirty years since the Falklands War, here known simply as The Conflict. A war to preserve the status quo, it had the paradoxical effect, as major conflicts invariably do, of changing nearly everything. BC to islanders means Before the Conflict. There are BC residents and post-conflict residents, BC buildings and post conflict buildings, the latter including the islands’ first cinema. And a tourist industry, growing steadily, is very much a post-conflict phenomenon.
Rival claims to the islands go back a long way and are far from being clear cut. The Papal ruling that divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) serves to bolster the Argentine claim, as does geographical proximity. But rival claims based on first settlement, longest continuous settlement (the British claim at the time of the Conflict) and other variants have kept international jurists happily occupied for centuries.
Some of the earliest visitors to the rich fisheries that surround the islands were mariners from St Malo in Brittany. They gave one of the earliest names to the islands, Les Iles Malouines. It is a Spanish pronunciation of the French name that produces Las Malvinas, the name by which the islands are known throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
